We are not sure exactly from which city in China my great-grandfather Chung hailed, but we speculate that he came from a city in the Guangdong province on China's southern coast. Historical records both in China and Jamaica show that on July 12, 1884, 680 Chinese landed in Kingston, Jamaica on a ship from Guangdong, China.  There were 501 men, 105 women, 54 boys, 17 girls, and three babies. If my grandfather did indeed come to Jamaica on that ship, he would have been approximately ten to twenty years old.  We are not certain of my great-grandfather's birth date, but we estimate that he was born around the early 1870's. Below left is a picture of my great-grandfather Chung.  To the right is a picture of my great-grandmother Miss Lou.

In Jamaica, Chung and Miss Lou bore a daughter named Princes (my mother's mother), whom I eulogize in my "Mango Mama" painting.  When my grandmother reached the age of six, her father Chung, wanted to take her and her mother (Miss Lou) to China, so that she could be educated in Chinese.  In Jamaica, it was a custom for Chinese men, who bore children with Jamaican women, to send their Chinese-Jamaican children to China for a Chinese education, when the children reached the age of six.  Consequently in certain parts of China, such as in Guangdong, there exists today, Chinese people who are mixed with Jamaican heritage. 

My great-grandmother Miss Lou, would have nothing to do with her daughter being educated in China and so she fled to Cuba instead. Chung headed back to China by himself.  On the way back to

China, he perished of sickness, on the ship. His body was thrown over sea.  I painted water for the background of the dragon to reference the ocean across which my great-grandfather traveled and in which his body rests. Below (to the left) is a picture of Chung and Miss Lou's beautiful daughter Princes (my grandmother) with her Spanish husband Julio (my grandfather). To the right is a picture of one of the beautiful daughters Princes and Julio bore, Georgina (my mother).

My mom inherited a lot of Chinese traits from her grandfather.  When she was a little girl, my mother was called, "La China" because of her eyes and "La Gallega," because of her fair complexion.  Gallegos are people from Galicia in the northwest coast of Spain.  Galicians have notoriously light complexions. When we lived in Tokyo, while I was in high school, people mistook my mother for being

Japanese. My mom and I share the same nickname. Cubans are big on nicknames. My extended family has always called me “La China,” on account of the almond-shaped eyes that I inherited from my mother.  They said that when I was born, I looked like a little Chinese baby, and that my eyes remained slanted as a little girl. Below are two pictures of me, one as a newborn in Cuba and the other as a toddler in Spain, just after we had left Cuba.  My eyes have widened some in my adulthood, but my aunts, uncles and cousins continue to call me "La China," pronounced "La Cheenah" in Spanish.

The Dragon, in my painting, wrapped around my great-grandparents is me.  I was born in the year of the dragon and hence enjoy a special relationship with my Chinese great-grandfather’s spirit.  Dragon's are creatures highly revered in Chinese culture.   I chose orange, yellow and red for the color of the dragon to emphasize the fire in my spirit, which I believe I inherited from my great-grandmother Miss Lou.

As long as I can remember, my family has remarked that I'm the spitting image, both body and soul, of Miss Lou. As a child, I used to cry, vainly, whenever my mother likened me to her feisty Jamaican grandmother, who had fallen in love with a man from China. I didn't want  to end up an old lady like Ms. Lou, with a blissfully senile mind under a big white fro. I simply did not understand how beautiful and beloved my great

grandmother was. Like it or not, Miss Lou obviously left a strong impression upon me in my early developmental stages. She died when I was in college, but the last time I saw her was when I was a toddler in Cuba.

There's a very large painting I'm working on now called, "Carnaval en La Calle Trocha." In the center of the work, I'm painting an image of the old "Jamaiquina," Miss Lou, dancing to the beat of the Cuban congas.

To the right is a picture of my lovely Jamaican great-grandmother Miss Lou in 1982 in Santiago de Cuba.  She's the ninety year-old one with the red flower in the white afro, sitting with a wonderful smile, in between my parents. 

For an interesting article in the Jamaican Gleaner on Chinese migration to Jamaica, click here.